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All of the communities Farmerline engaged with welcomed us with open arms<\/p><\/div>\n
I certainly tried my hand at the more traditional view of social engagement this summer. I rode along on the field visits, took some detailed notes of the day’s happenings, and my partners Marisa and Caleb can attest that I fumbled my way through a few interviews (Thank God for translators to make the conversation sound less awkward). While this certainly wasn’t the most comfortable work for me, it ended up being a truly enlightening experience. What I found interesting, eventually, was that the field work kept pulling out my engineering instincts, and I’d find myself puzzling over how to approach some idea or another from an engineering design lens. I’d talk to a farmer about the difficulty of determining when cocoa was perfectly ripe, and I’d spend the car ride back puzzling out ways to detect changes in soil or gases that could be easily and inexpensively monitored remotely. I’d hike a half mile down a muddy road with a box of pesticide and be thinking about the feasibility of drone delivery systems for last mile distribution. We visited a fish farm and Marisa gave me some strange looks on the drive back as I tried to puzzle out why dissolved oxygen sensors were so expensive.<\/p>\n
As the summer progressed, it became more and more clear to me that engineering, at its very core, isn’t about science, math, technology, or anything else like that. Engineering is about people. People have problems, inconveniences, or unfulfilled desires, and engineering is the art of leveraging the tools we have developed to solve those problems and meet those needs. Good engineering requires community engagement in order to define the problem as well of the constraints and criteria that need to be met in a successful solution to that problem. While it may not seem so on the surface, engineers are participating in a key form of social engagement–one with the possibility for transformational impact.<\/p>\n
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All of the work at Farmerline focused on the communities they sought to serve<\/p><\/div>\n
This realization has been really important for me over the past few months. First, it helped guide my interaction with the community I visited in Rwanda with Engineers Without Borders. Focusing on the project as a form of community engagement helped us focus and tailor our work, conversations, and trainings with the community, so that we could position ourselves as a resource for the community to seek its own development. Having that social engagement mindset helped us to be much more open to the feedback and ideas of the community, allowing us to gain a better understanding of the issues they face and the resources they have available. Even after this, my new understanding of engineering has been guiding my vocational discernment. All of my skills, talents, and interests align well with my interest in electrical engineering, but I now feel like I can have a fulfilling career as an engineer, balancing both my love of problem solving and my desire to have a positive social impact by looking for opportunities to leverage my engineering skills for worthy problems.<\/p>\n
My time with the Fellowship has been an incredible experience. It has pushed me outside of my comfort zone while giving me the opportunity to grow and learn through opportunities I never would have known existed. Most of all, it has helped to mold my own view of my role within the world, and given me hope for the ability of everyone to contribute to impactful development.<\/p>\n
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Peace out from team Farmerline!<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ll be honest, I got halfway through the first sentence of the prompt for this reflection, saw the words “social engagement,” and cringed a little bit. It’s a phrase that seems to simultaneously conjure up images of crowded rooms, loud … Continue reading